Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A Million Missing Punctuation Marks

Dear, dear. James Frey is at it again. The disgraced author of the fraudulent memoir "A Million Little Pieces" has a new book out.

First of all, let's give a little credit where credit is due: at least this time Frey had the sense to label the book a novel. "Bright Shiny Morning" is about LA. Yeah, LA. Hollywood. Tinseltown. A million shattered dreams. Tough-talking guys n'gals. Mexican maricons making it big as gossip columnists. Well, come on, what else?

Here's a game. Read the following excerpt to your friends. Then everyone tells at what point they knew the guy was going to grow up to be a gay gossip columnist:

"He was born in Miami his parents were Cuban. He grew up wanting to become an actor the biggest Latin movie star in history. As a child he dressed up and put on shows for his mother, his sister they both loved hin and his shows and they fawned over him he was a precocious child."

Harrumph, you say. Why, Desperate, is it so important that the character is a gossip columnist? Why dwell on the "gay" aspect? Answer: because nothing else happens here. The excerpt ends with the man (he doesn't have a name- see, LA is a big town full of nameless faceless people, get it? that's called literature, by the way- especially when you leave out the quotation marks) having a popular internet gossip column. It's basically a resume, actually. It's like the character notes for a novel Frey planned but never found the time to write.

Still, you have to hand it to Frey. It wasn't even two years ago that "A Million Little Pieces" was exposed and Oprah ripped him apart on national TV. It takes a lot of nerve to make this kind of comeback. Even as DIH types her little blog, "Bright Shiny Morning" is Number One on Amazon. And his publisher, Random House, reportedly gave Frey a $1.5 million advance for "BSM."